Chapter 2. Configuring Calligra and Your System

While Calligra should work quite nice out of the box, there may well be
some things to optimize to get the best out of Calligra. This chapter
shows you what you might want to do to achieve the best results with
your new office suite and make it suite your needs. Calligra is
highly configurable, even down to detailed toolbar and menu layout.

Customizing the Calligra GUI

While Calligra comes out of the box with a GUI (graphical user interface)
that should suit most people's needs, there are good reasons why you may
want to change the way the programs look.

My mother, for example, is a bit afraid of buttons and menu entries she
doesn't understand. To tailor Calligra to her needs, I reduced the
GUI to a bare minimum of functionality. As she only needs to write
letters and use certain templates, there is no need for much more
functionality than saving, loading, printing, etc.

Thanks to the “action” concept of Qt™ and KDE,
you can freely customize Calligra menubars and tool
bars. Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no easy-to-use dialogs
to do this. Calligra stores its GUI configuration in XML files
and you'll have to edit those. Hopefully, this situation will change
in the future; for now, you'll need some basic knowledge of how an
XML document works (or HTML, which is a subset of
XML).

Normally, each Calligra application has at least two of those XML
files: one describing the GUI of the shell (basically, that's what you
see if there is no document open) and one describing the GUI of the
respective part (that's what you see normally). For example, for
Calligra Words, these two XML files are named
calligra_shell.rc and words.rc.